


would you just please bury me with it?

by mambo



Series: child of thanos [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Body Horror, Identity Issues, Identity Porn, M/M, Steve As A Child Of Thanos, Suicidal Thoughts, Winter Soldier Bucky Barnes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-29
Updated: 2019-04-29
Packaged: 2020-02-09 20:49:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,471
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18645859
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mambo/pseuds/mambo
Summary: “It’s been three years to the day since you lost your sight,” Thanos tells the Captain.Though his sight wasn’t lost. It was taken.“Thank me for your training and I’ll give you new sight.”(Or, how Steve lost his eyes and gained new ones.)





	would you just please bury me with it?

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into 中文 available: [【翻译】would you just please bury me with it? /与我埋葬](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18954715) by [Yueluo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yueluo/pseuds/Yueluo)



> Listen, Egg-Game has turned me into Nomad Mambo. I'm dying my clothes black. Growing out my hair. Going for the three-quarters-length sleeves. And I'm getting edgy! Thanks to [humdrumvee](https://twitter.com/humdrumvee) for the beta read. And thanks to [hakunahistata](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hakunahistata/pseuds/hakunahistata) for your general flailing about this idea with me! I love you!

— —

_ Fifty-Eight Years Ago _

— —

The Captain falls to his knees. Distantly, he hears the sound of his own screaming.

“You need to be stronger than this,” Thanos says. “You’re too easily distracted.” There’s the sound of something wet dropping to the ground. The Captain still screams; one of his siblings snickers. “You’ll thank me for this in time.”

The Captain pulls his hands away from the empty sockets that once held his eyes. He feels the tremors running through them but as hard as he tries, he cannot see them. He cannot see them.

“Not so cocky now,” he hears Proxima Midnight say as her footsteps approach. He looks up but cannot see, he  _ can’t see _ and she’s hitting him, a sharp sting against the side of his face before he falls to the ground again. 

“Come on now,” Thanos admonishes, but the Captain can hear the smile in his voice. 

The Captain pulls himself up, then throws himself at where he thinks Proxima Midnight stands. But he stumbles, ends up catching himself with his hands just before there’s another kick to his sternum, and he lands on his back. 

“Pathetic,” she says.

The Captain groans. The air rushing inside of his empty eye sockets half-tickles, makes him feel sick. His whole body aches. Not for the first time, he wishes for death.

“Leave him be. There will be time,” Thanos says. The Captain feels Thanos’ large, familiar hands hoist him up. “He’s a child, but children grow.” 

The Captain feels sick.

“Find your way to your chambers and rest,” he says. “Do not ask for help.”

The Captain whimpers but he complies.

— —

It takes him hours, stumbling around the ship, grasping for clues he knows aren’t there, but he finds his chambers. He’s parched but can’t find water. Even though his throat burns, he collapses into his bed with relief. Tears well in his empty eye sockets and he can feel them mixing with the dried blood on his cheeks. For the first time, he’s grateful he can’t see; he wouldn’t want to see what he’s become. 

What his father has made him.

Sleep. He needs to sleep. He fumbles with his blanket and pulls it over his body, aware that he’s still wearing his practice leathers, that he hasn’t bothered to wash his face off. But he doesn’t know where his few other articles of clothing are, or how to find water. “Fuck,” he mutters. “Fuck,” he says again, voice cracking, more tears falling. If he can just sleep, he can dream. And if he dreams, he may dream of him. 

All he wants is to dream of him, his hands, his soft hair, his eyes. His beautiful blue eyes, which he can still envision in his mind even if he’ll never see the color blue again. He focuses on those blue eyes, the plush lips curving into a smile. He’s had this dream so many times and he wants to chase it into better reality.

He drifts off to sleep, but he doesn’t dream. Instead, he screams.

— —

“Wake up,” Nebula says, slapping the Captain across the face.

The Captain jerks up, awake, alert. The world is still black. 

“What did he do to you?” she asks. He can feel the weight of her body on the bed next to him. He reaches out and finds her arm.

“I was distracted in combat. There was a child. I couldn’t look away.” He swallows hard. “I was punished for it.”

She’s silent for a long moment. “Finally punishment falls on your head,” she says. If it were anyone else, he’d assume they were gloating, but Nebula has seen their father’s punishments more acutely than any of the other Children of Thanos. He’s the one who has picked her up, piece by piece, off the floor and put her back together.

“Will you kill me?” the Captain asks, almost eager at the prospect. If it were Nebula, it would be okay. Nebula would do right by him.

“You know I cannot. Father would not have you dead.”

The Captain swallows hard. “I may as well be.”

“Stop it. You know that this isn’t the end.” She takes his hand in his and holds it tight. “Do you feel that?” she asks. He nods. “You have four other senses. Use them. Earn back your sight. If you show yourself, you know that Thanos will have a solution.”

Words catch at the back of his throat. Cruel words. Words that will hurt her.

“Say it,” Nebula says.

“What if he recreates me like he’s recreated you?” he asks.

“Then you’ll accept it.” She squeezes his hand so tight that it will bruise. “You have no other choice.”

— —

Nebula spars with him every day, away from the prying eyes of their other siblings. She does not spare him any sympathy; her blows are quick and painful. But when he falls, she pulls him back up, explains to him what happened, what he needs to pay attention to going forward.

With time, he improves. He starts to hear his opponents’ footsteps, the way their weapons slice through the air. The Captain finds that his voice becomes an asset; he uses it to taunt, to goad his opponents into making stupid, predictable moves. Defensiveness or irritation makes fools of all of his siblings at one point or another. Fear keeps his other opponents sluggish, breathing hard. Fighting becomes simple again, organic. The calculations change but they become routine again.

He starts wearing a pair of goggles Nebula finds jammed in an equipment closet. They’re heavy around his eyes but help him focus on things other than his loss. They also keep others from looking at him as though he is a weak target. The Captain recoils at being seen as weak, something in his bones rejecting the notion. Even if he does not remember a time before Thanos, he knows that he was never weak.

One day, after they’ve saved another world, his father comes to him. “You’re fiercer than you’ve ever been,” he says, a hand on the Captain’s shoulder. It’s surprising and heavy, but he does not so much as flinch.

“I have to be,” the Captain says. “I have no other choice.”

“Everyone has a choice,” Thanos says. “You could’ve broken down. On that first day, I feared you may.”

The Captain’s jaw tenses, thinking of his conversation with Nebula that day. How he asked her to let him die. But it’s clear now, that it was never an option. He’s alive until his father lets him die.

“I’ll never back down,” the Captain says, voice hard. 

“I know that. That’s why you’re here.”

“What do you want from me?” the Captain asks. Thanos does not give praise readily and when he does, there’s always a reason. The Captain’s heart sinks at the thought of another test.

The Captain can hear the smile in Thanos’ voice as he says, “I have a mission for you, Captain. If you can manage, I will have a gift for you.”

“What’s the mission?” the Captain asks, knowing that a gift from Thanos is more likely a punishment.

“You’ll see soon, Captain.” Thanos pats him on the back, hard. Steve sways.  “You’ll see soon.”

— —

His father pushes the Captain into the pit with a simple “Good luck.”

The Captain falls. Rather than panicking, he counts the seconds before he lands to try to gauge the pits depth, while clicking his tongue, using the vibrations to try to feel out where the walls of the pit are. He’s just able suss out where the bottom of the pit is, then drops into a roll for his landing. Once he’s at the bottom, he takes a moment, just a moment, to breathe.

The Captain presses his fingers into the soft earth, then brings some dirt up to his nose to sniff. It’s a little moist, a little compacted, but it’s just dirt. Nothing harmful coming from the ground, at least. He brings himself to his feet and clicks his tongue again, a hand out in front of him to touch the wall of the pit. It seems to be about fifteen feet in diameter. Compact but not suffocating.

“What do you want from here?” he yells up to his father above.

“You’ll see,” Thanos says.

Then the footsteps come.

— —

He fights for what feels like hours, slicing through many-legged, slithering creatures whose fangs are filled with venom. Their bodies litter the bottom of the pit and the Captain must find a way to navigate through them while still fighting off three of the creatures at a time. Still, he overpowers them, their blood warm on his face, soaking his clothes.

“What next?” he yells to them, to Thanos, to himself. He growls from deep in his throat as he slices the skittering feet off of another one of the creatures. It makes a guttural, unhappy sound, but goes silent as the Captain slices its throat. There’s a thump as it slips off of his blade and onto the ground. No more appear. He scans the pit, takes the moment of respite to catch his breath.

“Come up, son,” Thanos calls.

The Captain does not need to be told twice. He attaches his blade back to his back, then takes two knives from his belt, holding one in each hand. He stabs the wall of the pit over and over, pulling himself up. It takes time; his arms are aching by the time he can hear the opening, the wind rush. His father stands over the pit watching, a foreboding presence at the top.

“You are strong,” Thanos says as the Captain pulls himself out of the pit and pulls himself back up onto his feet. “And intelligent. You’ve adapted well.”

The Captain says nothing, but plants his feet firmly on the grass. He wants to wash the blood from his face, get the metallic taste of it off of his lips.

“Take off your goggles,” Thanos demands.

The Captain’s heart thumps quickly in his chest at the request — what more can Thanos take from him? His hearing? His tongue? His blood runs cold at the thought of losing his ability to communicate through sound. Still, he does as his father asks him, leaving his face bare and vulnerable to his father’s whims.

There’s a rustling sound, a clinking of sorts. He feels his father loom over him and he tilts his face upwards accordingly. The Captain tries to brace himself for whatever loss comes next. It could be survivable. Though, he feels like he can’t breathe.

“It’s been three years to the day since you lost your sight,” Thanos tells him.

Though his sight wasn’t lost. It was taken.

“You’ve proven yourself again and again in that time, my son.” He feels something cold and round slip into the empty socket of his right eye. A moment later, he feels something similar slip into the socket of his left eye. He closes his lids, then opens them again. He still sees nothing. “Thank me for your training and I’ll give you new sight,” Thanos says.

There is a moment, just a moment, where the Captain does not want to comply. He wants to stand his ground, to scream and pound his fists and kill his father, to slit his throat and see him bleed. He thinks of Nebula’s screams as their father experiments on her, his other siblings’ derisive laughter as he fell to the ground. The Captain thinks of the day he woke up with his father at his side, promising him they would save the universe. Apparently, the path to redemption is covered in blood: his own, and others’.

But he also thinks of what it will be like to see again. He wants to see the grass, the sky. He wants to see people’s faces in case…

In case.

In case one of them is.

Blue eyes.

Tears fill his eyes as he drops to the ground, kneeling. “Thank you father,” he says.

“For what?” Thanos asks.

“For giving me this gift, for sharpening me as the sword of your cause. Thank you,” he repeats, looking up.

He hopes that it’s enough.

There’s a click and a warmth from inside his eye sockets. He shuts his eyes and when he opens them, he sees a world in bright Technicolor. The grass is so green he can feel it. The sky is so blue he can taste it. And his father looks on as he takes in every molecule of the world around him, vivid and intense in a way that nearly overwhelms him. Even with his eyes, his sight was never like this. It’s like he can see time. Tears slip down his cheeks as he looks at his own hands for the first time in three years, inspects the creatures’ red blood and the new white scars that weren’t there the last time he saw them.

“Your eyes were always weak,” Thanos says. “These are more appropriate for my soldier, my shield,” he says. The Captain looks up at his father, more towering and intimidating in sight than in sound, who has something else in his hands. It’s a round, silver disc. He holds it out to Steve. “This is a weapon you will find worthy of your skills.”

The Captain takes it with shaking hands, lets his fingertips run over the cool metal before strapping it to his arm.

“I was unsure when I plucked you from your pathetic world, Captain, but now I’m certain. You are as much my son as any of my other children.”

“I am,” the Captain says in a shaky voice. “I am.”

— —

As they leave, he hesitates a moment, picking up his goggles from where they slipped into the grass, and carrying them along with him.

— —

_ Today _

— —

“Your eyes glow even when you’re asleep,” Bucky tells him one night as they lay together naked in bed. Steve looks at Bucky’s face, cataloging every perfect inch of it into his memory. It’s better than a dream. His skin is so warm, so soft underneath his hand.

“Does it bother you?” Steve asks.

Bucky shakes his head. “It reminds me that you’re here with me. You’re a lighthouse. I’m a ship coming to rest.”

Sometimes Bucky speaks poetry. Steve takes Bucky’s hand and presses it to his face so he can nuzzle in close. He shuts his eyes and memorizes the feel.

“They’re beautiful,” Bucky says. “Your eyes.”

“You’re beautiful.” Steve drops Bucky’s hand and opens his eyes, pulls Bucky in close to him. “If I could put you inside of myself and carry you always, I would.”

“I would, Steve. I would, too.”

The sentiment is strange, he knows. But.

Things can be taken so quickly.

They both know that.

**Author's Note:**

> Come hang out with me on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/mamboao3) or [Tumblr](whtaft.tumblr.com). And hey! Thanks for the support. The comments on part one gave me the real boost of confidence to continue, so here I am! And this is gonna keep going. These boys have a story that needs to be told. So, maybe subscribe to the series?


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